Humanoid Autonomous Weight-Lifting

One of the humanoid events held at RoboGames this year was autonomous weight-lifting.

This event isn’t entirely new to the RoboGames venue; it and related events were first introduced in 2007.  But they haven’t been very consistent about it, either — the couple of times I attended RoboGames in the last few years, we were lucky to get someone to actually run the standard Robo-One style competitions, and never mind anything extra.

But apparently more effort was put into the humanoid events this year, because robotics reporter Lem Fugitt caught some cool videos of the weight-lifting competition.  First, here’s an interesting-looking humanoid from Korea called RnD_Eska:

And then here’s a NAO called Looney doing the same event:

The official rules are hosted at the RoboGames site, but are cribbed from the 2007 HuroCup event, run by FIRA.

I’m a fan of anything that pushes the advancement of humanoid robotics, and especially if it can fire up the crowd and maybe encourage a few of the onlookers to go home and build something.  Not everybody cares for robot fighting competitions, so things like music, dance, and gymnastics are important to reach a wider audience.  Does weight-lifting have a useful place in this spectrum?  Weigh in with your thoughts below.